It is beyond dispute that media coverage of the American military and overseas military operations has changed dramatically since World War II.  Throughout that conflict, in print and via newsreels and radio, the domestic media portrayed the American fighting man of that conflict as heroic and the American cause as noble.  Opposition, such as it was, was almost totally ignored.

How far we have traveled since.  Contemporary press coverage of the military in Iraq, while purporting to extol the individual soldier, in practice has slandered him as engaging in murder and excess, comparing him to the worst butchers of the Saddam regime. As for cause for which he fights, i.e., the mission to liberate and establish a democratic government in Iraq, the media coverage has been relentlessly hostile.

Our enemy and the media share common cause in the desire to undermine the military’s mission in Iraq. The enemy plays on this hostility in the media, which allows itself to be manipulated to spread the terrorists message and propaganda. Knowing how negative press coverage contributed to America quitting Vietnam in defeat, the terrorists are counting on the same process obtaining the same result in Iraq.

That negative media coverage undermines domestic support of the military and military operations is without question. The American public receives images and opinions about the Iraq War through the media’s prism of negativity. Night after night, day and day, story after story, the negative is emphasized. It is clear, beyond any reasonable dispute, that the media has taken it upon itself to use its reporting to convince the American people that the Iraq war is a mistake, that the American military has conducted atrocities in Iraq, that the United States has no business in Iraq, that the mission there is a failure, and on and on. The positive stories the media has reported from Iraq are so few and far between that one is shocked when such a story is aired.

Victory is the objective of military operations. Achieving victory in war is often a bloody business, because people, regrettably including innocent people, wind up getting killed. If CNN correspondents had aired reports from Berlin or Tokyo in 1945 the pictures of the carnage would not have been pretty. Nevertheless, the waging of total war against both Germany and Japan, the necessity for destroying each nation utterly in order to achieve total victory, was in the national interest.    Accordingly,  the government and military practiced a modest form of censorship during the war.   Media reports were monitored to ensure that military secrets were preserved and information which might discourage the American public was either withheld or softened to maintain domestic morale.  It was understood that the national interest in maximizing the nation’s ability to wage war to total victory outweighed the temporary withholding of truthful information from the press.   And this was in a time when the media coverage of the war was almost exclusively positive.

Today, as the United States faces an enemy equally as odious as the Nazis, and one intent on our destruction,  we have a media indifferent to the wartime objectives of the nation and overwhelmingly hostile to the means employed to gain those objectives.    Yet the media enjoys more access to military personnel and information than at any time in American history.    I believe this practice is inimical to the nation's ability to wage war.   It is akin to allowing a fifth colum to function in the rearward areas of the army in the field.    Reporters are not using their unprecedented access to communicate positive stories back home but to find everything negative they can, blowing it up beyond all proportion, and transmitting around the world to diminish morale in the U.S. and damage our image in other nations.   This does the work of the terrorists - in far greater circulation than the terrorists are capable of if left to their own devices.     The one-sided nature of the reporting takes its toll on public support for the war; like water eroding granite, eventually a fissure opens between the public and the men in uniform.   This is the way to defeat.

The contemporary media is a cancer to the ability of the nation to make war successfully.  Populated by leftists schooled in the curriculum of the "hate America" dominant on university campuses,  hostile to any use of their country's power,  the reporting of  todays media on the war against Islamic fascists is the equivalent of Dr. Goebbel's Nazi propaganda.   It tears away at the soul of those subject to it, all the while corrupting and diminishing the practioner.  

The "free" press of today is incompatible with the nation's ability to wage war successfully, if the press is overwhelmningly hostilte to the war and the war's objectives.   Lincoln recognized this during the Civil War when he shutdown newspapers in the North hostile to the Union's war measures.   Today we would condemn such acts as unconstitutional.   Yet, as Lincoln noted in another context, of what use is any particular protection of the constitution, if the nation should perish?  

The question should be pondered as the media continues to report from Iraq and points to be determined in the war against the terrorists.